Samsung is reneging on promises it made to quickly dole out an Android update for one of its best-selling phones.
The manufacturer was supposed to roll out the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade for the Galaxy S II tomorrow, but now it says the process won’t happen until a bit later.
The company said that it does have a new date confirmed internally but is not yet sharing it with the public. This comes as just the latest setback in the Ice Cream Sandwich update saga.
The first phone that tried to update was the Nexus S, a phone that Google actually had an active hand in developing. The upgrade process seemed to be running smoothly, with handsets beginning to receive the new OS in December.
But Google quickly yanked the updates after numerous reports of upgraded phones freezing and crashing. It would not admit that was the reason for pulling the update, but we have to assume that it was.
Then, early this year, Asus decided to push Ice Cream Sandwich to its Transformer Prime tablet. Same story. Updates began being sent through, but users reported numerous instances of crashing software as soon as ICS was installed. So that update was yanked as well.
Ice Cream Sandwich came built-in to the Galaxy Nexus phone, and on that device it runs just fine, but getting legacy devices to come on board has been the most embarrassing part of Android’s history to date.
Only about 1% of active Android device are running Ice Cream Sandwich today. Many manufacturers have pledged sweeping updates for their devices, but few have promised to make that happen before the second half of this year.
